Where Enrons Come From

Scandal is such a walloping grand lot of fun for everyone. It doesn’t cost anything to watch and it’s risk-free for all except the perpetrators. It doesn’t require dieting or exercise. Above all, it gives us the warm, cozy feeling of moral superiority and good fortune that comes only from seeing somebody else get into trouble, particularly if that somebody is rich, powerful or famous. The mighty brought low is always a winning theme.

So the country is enjoying the Enron mess a lot. Congress has fallen upon it like a starving dog on a bone and news outlets can’t leave it alone. The scandal seems to get worse every day, stoking the media frenzy still more. High executives of Enron, a former stock market sweetheart that collapsed into bankruptcy recently, apparently cooked the books in a blatant fraud and quietly took in hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of their own stock, while urging lower-ranking employees and the public to buy shares. Now the stock is worth next to nothing, people have been ruined, and the blaming is underway.

We can count on this much: Congress and the Justice Department won’t find the root causes for scandals like this one because they won’t look in the right place.

The right place? The high school in Piper, Kansas, about 20 miles west of downtown Kansas City.

A science teacher at Piper High recently found that 28 of 118 sophomores submitting a botany term project had lifted verbatim whole chunks of their allegedly original work from papers written by others, papers posted on internet "cheat sites." The teacher gave all the cheating students zeroes. The students protested mightily, their parents did the same before the school board, and the latter collapsed like a fallen souffle and reduced the penalties. The teacher quit in disgust (one student told her, gloating, "We won") and others have given notice.

The kids at Piper did learn, of course. They learned that they don’t have to keep promises that turn out later to be inconvenient (they and their parents signed agreements at the beginning of the year spelling out penalties for plagiarism and copying). They learned that only suckers take the hard road. They learned that rules shouldn’t get in the way of self-interest. All this would seem excellent training for the moral weaklings we will need to staff future Enrons.

But there is more to this, and it does not bear on the students, the teachers, the parents, the board, and the executives of Enron. It has to do with the spectators watching these circuses, and loudly huffing and puffing about the decline in standards. It has to do with us.

I can’t help but wonder how many of us decrying the dishonesty at Enron have cooked our own books by fudging a little on our income tax now and then. We might be outraged if a parallel were drawn; our sin, we could say, was nothing, a trifle, so tiny and common (everybody does it) that it was barely worth the name of sin compared with the billions involved at Enron.

But wasn’t it the same kind of offense, really—and will the great judge of us all bother to make distinctions of degree? For that matter, will our children and grandchildren, for whom we set a life example, make such distinctions, either?

I can’t help but wonder how many of those shouting loudest about student cheating at Piper peeked at the exam paper of the smart kid next to them when they were in school. And I can’t help but wonder how many who castigated the Piper school board as gutless caved in to pressure from their own peers or superiors at work.

Once I interviewed a bright young executive, a happily married father of two, a deacon of his church. I interviewed him in Lompoc Federal Prison, where he was doing time for his involvement in a colossal corporate fraud, and my purpose was to find out how he and others had been gradually drawn into such a crime. He mentioned a fellow executive who had quit early on, and said, "John was a black-and-white kind of man. I’m very much afraid I was a shades-of-grey kind of man."

He had started small, with sharp but legal dealing. With pressure from above, through gradual stages he had ended as a thief, a liar, a felon. The same risk to which he succumbed lies before us all. We love scandal because it allows us to believe in the illusion that there are good people and bad people and that we, of course, are good people. In the scandal of the moment we can bury our own failings.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobelist in literature and one of the most powerful moral voices of the century past, won’t let us get away with that. He said, "the line that divides good and evil is not a line that divides good men from bad men, but a line which cuts through the middle of every human heart."

A good thing to remember when we open the newspaper or turn on CNN.